Early
The The total losses are almost certainly much larger: The data does not include transactions that took place on a series of popular crypto marketplaces that started offering the coin only after its price had already surged.
The price of $Trump hovered around $17 this week, less than a quarter of its $75 peak value.
Whether people made or lost money, it was stellar business for the Trumps. Nearly $100 million in trading fees have flowed to the family and its partners, although most of that has not yet been cashed out, the Chainalysis data shows.
President Trump set off this scramble three days before he was inaugurated, triggering a rapid boom-and-bust sequence that has now raised broader questions about the speculative dangers of so-called memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot.
He promoted the coin on his own social media platform, as well as Elon Musk’s X, saying: “Join my very special Trump Community. The The trading is built on large early buys by sophisticated traders who pump up the price, only to sell their holdings as less experienced retail investors follow their lead and buy in, and often end up with losses.
What makes this situation particularly troubling, to government watchdogs and former regulators, is that the Trump family is profiting from this exploitative pattern at the same time that Mr. Trump is rapidly moving to bring an abrupt end to a regulatory crackdown on crypto by several government agencies.
“The president is participating in shady crypto schemes that harm investors while at the same time appointing financial regulators who will roll back protections for victims and who may insulate him and his family from enforcement,” said Corey Frayer, who recently left a post as a crypto adviser to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The losses on the $Trump bet were very real for hundreds of thousands of investors, including some who are vocal supporters of Mr. Trump. The On Whit In Whit Whit As Mr. Trump promoted crypto on the campaign trail, he also helped start a company called World Liberty Financial, which offered a digital currency called $WLFI to certain wealthy investors with experience in financial markets.
Last week, Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Mr. Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, announced that it was moving into the financial services industry by creating a brand known as TruthFi that will offer investment products tied to Bitcoin.
Trump Media’s chief executive, Devin Nunes, called the offerings “a competitive alternative to the woke funds and debanking problems that you find throughout the market.”
But the debut of the $Trump memecoin was the first time the Trump family had marketed a new crypto token directly to ordinary investors.
At the request of The Times, crypto experts reconstructed some of the early trades made by buyers of Mr. Trump’s token, examining their profit taking and how, once the initial buyers started to dump their holdings, the price of $Trump then crashed, hurting other investors.
The analysis of crypto transaction records was executed by the forensic firms Nansen and Chainalysis as well as by Molly White, an independent crypto researcher who is often critical of the industry. The The The This analysis can also point to anomalies in trades that raise questions.
For example, blockchain records show that the $Trump token was “minted” at 9:01 a.m. Eastern time on Jan. 17, creating a so-called contract address. The It had been filled that evening with virtual currencies, seemingly ready to pounce on a new offering.
The well-timed trades, and the fact that the wallet received its funding shortly before Mr. Trump’s coin launched, immediately drew skepticism from crypto analysts, who speculated that a trader had been acting on inside information.
In the crypto world, pinning down the person behind a trade is sometimes impossible. Social Same When Same The According Chain The early trades were some of the most profitable: 31 of these large early traders made $669 million in profits in a matter of days, according to the Nansen analysis.
But for every winner, there were even more losers. Across the first 19 days of trading, a total of 813,294 wallets registered losses, either by cashing out at a loss or holding onto coins that had plummeted in value.
The losers — those who paid more for the token than it is now worth — cumulatively have lost $2 billion, in actual or paper losses. Still, many of these traders are holding on to their money-losing tokens, perhaps hopeful that the price will rise again, the data shows.
The profits mostly secured by the early buyers were enormous: a total of $6.6 billion in cashed-out profits, according to Chainalysis.
This is a familiar pattern for crypto traders. Some (Ms. Welch said on X that she was “fully cooperating with and am committed to assisting the legal team representing the individuals impacted.”)
“This is similar to sports betting or gambling,” said Gareth Rhodes, a former deputy superintendent at the New York State Department of Financial Services, which helps regulate the crypto industry and other financial services companies. “The retail customer putting in their funds is doing so at risk of losing most if not all of it with the hope of an outsize payoff.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
